Asunder by Chloe Aridjis: More interested in being than becoming

The second novel by London-based author Chloe Aridjis, Asunder appears on its surface to be about quiet contemplation, and how far it is possible to abstract oneself from the dramas and traumas of social interaction. Claiming not to suffer from listlessness or boredom, protagonist Marie has sought out a job (but not a career) as a museum guard at the National Gallery, working there as "I have always been more interested in being than becoming", killing time by trying to guess how long remains before closing without looking at her watch, or ruminating upon the gradual process of paint cracking.

After nine uneventful years, Marie becomes restless. The sad, quiet death of a 68-year-old colleague, felled by a heart attack at work, jolts her into realising that life is slowly slipping away from her. Her friendship with poet Daniel, fired from the Gallery for noisily pacing around, encourages her to think about his unrequited loves and her own brief liaisons "that didn’t threaten the peace", but when he offers to take her to Paris, she struggles with the potential short-term change to her routine, deliberating for days before taking the trip which irrevocably alters her carefully contained world.

"Painters create order from disorder, but the moment that order has been created, the slow march towards disorder begins again", reflects Marie, and her greatest fear, it seems, is of encounters that will change her situation in any way. Like her, Daniel keeps people at a distance, writing to other poets across the world, preferring not to meet them as this always leads to the correspondence shrivelling; Marie wrote to a prisoner who later escaped from Belmarsh, the realisation that he had her address leading her to panic that he would enter her life in a ruinous fashion (as in Robert Hamer’s It Always Rains on Sunday, about a Bethnal Green housewife whose life is torn apart by this very occurrence). This does not happen, and Marie wonders what became of her penfriend: finally, in Paris, she reaches the uncharacteristic yet inevitable point where she spontaneously breaks out of herself and struggles to connect with an inscrutable stranger.

At its core, Asunder is about time: how slowly it passes, the futility of trying to fight its effects, and generational changes in people and ideas. Besides her memories of vanished shops and her knowledge of different approaches to the restoration of art, Marie often thinks about the history of violence against the suffragettes, as well as her great-grandfather Ted, and the most significant moment of his life as a National Gallery guard, in 1914, when he slipped in trying to catch Mary Richardson, granting her vital seconds to slash Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus in protest against Emmeline Pankhurst’s imprisonment. As a child, Marie heard this story countless times, aware that she was supposed to see Richardson as a criminal but sympathising with her cause, touchingly confessing that "I loved [Ted] just a tiny bit more for not reaching her in time".

Asunder communicates its ideas, and their supporting cultural references, subtly and efficiently. Aridjis is particularly strong on the nature of travel, in London and in general. Her prose is full of deft imagery – such as the way the women "comb the city from [their] hair" on changing into their Gallery uniform – and the moment where Marie becomes aware that she has become "captive to that irrational behaviour in foreign cities when you feel everyone is watching when in reality not a soul has noticed your existence" is especially touching.

The influence of nouveau roman authors such as Marguerite Duras and Nathalie Sarraute, and British counterparts Ann Quin and Christine-Brooke-Rose can be felt in the rarefied focus on the narrator’s interior world, her corresponding observations of the mundane realities of so much human behaviour, and the way in which her narrative slowly builds towards a climax that changes her life without feeling life-changing. As a reminder that life will pass you by if you choose to experience it passively, however, Asunder is far more powerful than it immediately seems.

Protagonist Marie takes a job as a museum guard at the National Gallery. Photograph: Getty Images.

Juliet Jacques is a freelance journalist and writer who covers gender, sexuality, literature, film, art and football. Her writing can be found on her blog at and she can be contacted on Twitter @julietjacques.

Leader: The unresolved Eurozone crisis

The eurozone crisis was never resolved. It was merely conveniently forgotten. The vote for Brexit, the terrible war in Syria and Donald Trump’s election as US president all distracted from the single currency’s woes. Yet its contradictions endure, a permanent threat to continental European stability and the future cohesion of the European Union.

The resignation of the Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi, following defeat in a constitutional referendum on 4 December, was the moment at which some believed that Europe would be overwhelmed. Among the champions of the No campaign were the anti-euro Five Star Movement (which has led in some recent opinion polls) and the separatist Lega Nord. Opponents of the EU, such as Nigel Farage, hailed the result as a rejection of the single currency.

An Italian exit, if not unthinkable, is far from inevitable, however. The No campaign comprised not only Eurosceptics but pro-Europeans such as the former prime minister Mario Monti and members of Mr Renzi’s liberal-centrist Democratic Party. Few voters treated the referendum as a judgement on the monetary union.

To achieve withdrawal from the euro, the populist Five Star Movement would need first to form a government (no easy task under Italy’s complex multiparty system), then amend the constitution to allow a public vote on Italy’s membership of the currency. Opinion polls continue to show a majority opposed to the return of the lira.

But Europe faces far more immediate dangers. Italy’s fragile banking system has been imperilled by the referendum result and the accompanying fall in investor confidence. In the absence of state aid, the Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, the world’s oldest bank, could soon face ruin. Italy’s national debt stands at 132 per cent of GDP, severely limiting its firepower, and its financial sector has amassed $360bn of bad loans. The risk is of a new financial crisis that spreads across the eurozone.

EU leaders’ record to date does not encourage optimism. Seven years after the Greek crisis began, the German government is continuing to advocate the failed path of austerity. On 4 December, Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, declared that Greece must choose between unpopular “structural reforms” (a euphemism for austerity) or withdrawal from the euro. He insisted that debt relief “would not help” the immiserated country.

Yet the argument that austerity is unsustainable is now heard far beyond the Syriza government. The International Monetary Fund is among those that have demanded “unconditional” debt relief. Under the current bailout terms, Greece’s interest payments on its debt (roughly €330bn) will continually rise, consuming 60 per cent of its budget by 2060. The IMF has rightly proposed an extended repayment period and a fixed interest rate of 1.5 per cent. Faced with German intransigence, it is refusing to provide further funding.

Ever since the European Central Bank president, Mario Draghi, declared in 2012 that he was prepared to do “whatever it takes” to preserve the single currency, EU member states have relied on monetary policy to contain the crisis. This complacent approach could unravel. From the euro’s inception, economists have warned of the dangers of a monetary union that is unmatched by fiscal and political union. The UK, partly for these reasons, wisely rejected membership, but other states have been condemned to stagnation. As Felix Martin writes on page 15, “Italy today is worse off than it was not just in 2007, but in 1997. National output per head has stagnated for 20 years – an astonishing . . . statistic.”

Germany’s refusal to support demand (having benefited from a fixed exchange rate) undermined the principles of European solidarity and shared prosperity. German unemployment has fallen to 4.1 per cent, the lowest level since 1981, but joblessness is at 23.4 per cent in Greece, 19 per cent in Spain and 11.6 per cent in Italy. The youngest have suffered most. Youth unemployment is 46.5 per cent in Greece, 42.6 per cent in Spain and 36.4 per cent in Italy. No social model should tolerate such waste.

“If the euro fails, then Europe fails,” the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has often asserted. Yet it does not follow that Europe will succeed if the euro survives. The continent that once aspired to be a rival superpower to the US is now a byword for decline, and ethnic nationalism and right-wing populism are thriving. In these circumstances, the surprise has been not voters’ intemperance, but their patience.